Research hospitals are using the brain of novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch to help find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, it was revealed last night.

Murdoch died at age of 79 in February after suffering from the disease for four years. Before her death, she had asked that her body be donated to science, her husband, John Bayley, told London’s Daily Telegraph.

“We were both happy about it in the days when she could be happy about anything,” Bayley said.

After her death, Murdoch’s brain was preserved in formalin.

“The brain is very, very soft in life and in death. It has to be ‘fixed’ in formalin, which takes several months, and then microscope slides [slices] are made,” said Professor Robin Jacoby, Murdoch’s doctor in her last months.

“We will be looking at the different cells and looking for the lesions of Alzheimer’s disease, and correlating them with different psychological deficits that were found in life.”